Heya, folks! As promised a month ago, I'm here to release the first official episode of Anton's Vacation! Sure, it may be a little later than I promised, but a week is nothing! I think I lost part of my soul creating this in less than two months, but I stuck to my guns and got it finished.

Episode One (The Orange Duck Tape Experience): Anton Rogers, Supreme Commander of the Katajion Directorship and hero of the universe, has had enough. After saving humanity from a destructive war that ravaged the universe for decades, there's nothing he wants more than to just take a few days away from the death and destruction. With his two beautiful bodyguards and assistant in tow, the young commander prepares for the blissful paradise. Yet, the most dangerous mission of all awaits him. A splinter cell with a weapon that could spell the death of millions threatens the lives of not only his comrades, but the entire planet of Uterik with countless innocents. Can Anton prevent the disaster that has been foretold and save the day or is he doomed to devastating fate?

The game contains 2,201 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 23,685 words,
for an average of 10.8 words per screen.
The game contains *** menus.

Note: The version that was originally uploaded, the one that was up for about three minutes, is not the correct version. It was missing the credits. It has since been changed, but one person managed to download it in that time, hence the need for this disclaimer. Oh, and I just noticed that I included the info for the beta and the credits show beta information in addition to the correct. That has been corrected.

Screenshots!

Last edited by KomiTsuku on Wed Jan 25, 2012 7:39 am, edited 4 times in total.

It was an interesting start, but not quite awesome yet. So far, the plot seems to be more of an info dump of the background story that you'll need for the later episodes. There was a lot of exposition about the world, the universe, and the girls' back stories, but not much in the way of real plot, aside from the basic setup. Even if this episode wasn't really that exciting, I'll stick around and see what the second episode's like.

The graphics were quite competent throughout. The fact that all of the minor characters have sprites is pretty impressive. The CGs are of decent grade and there are quite a good number of them. The backgrounds were also generally well drawn as well.

I recommend changing the text font into something that's absolutely easy to read. Bland isn't a bad thing where the text is concerned. Something simple and basic works the best.

Also, what happened that caused that one CG of Yoi hugging Anton in the stairs to be drawn in a completely different style?

Overall, even though this episode seemed more of a setup than the real deal, the production values seem pretty nice, so you have my support for episode 2.

I think my big comment is that I'm no longer sure what sort of tone you're trying to set with this game.

You're mixing a serious action-romance setup with fourth-wall breaking and random forum references - and I'm not sure the game benefits from it. Having the death of billions foreshadowed by an author self-insert - it took me incredibly far out of the game. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to care about these characters, or laugh at them.

While I think the game is technically better - honestly, the new content hurt what I thought was a promising story.

Supporting creators since 2004(When was the last time you backed up your game?)

I think my big comment is that I'm no longer sure what sort of tone you're trying to set with this game.

You're mixing a serious action-romance setup with fourth-wall breaking and random forum references - and I'm not sure the game benefits from it. Having the death of billions foreshadowed by an author self-insert - it took me incredibly far out of the game. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to care about these characters, or laugh at them.

While I think the game is technically better - honestly, the new content hurt what I thought was a promising story.

I got mixed feedback in the beta testing on this. The more I look at it, the more it is starting to dawn on me just how much of the pacing and tone it throws off. The reason I ended up keeping it was because it had been established in prior works, showing the taskmaster status of between Chief and Anton and bringing some humor into the work. While it has worked previously, I guess this is point where I need to seriously reconsider the value and certain plot points I am getting out of this versus the damage to the pacing. Personally, I think I let too much action/drama get into a piece that was supposed to be much more humorous and light-hearted. I went for sitcom and got an action/drama. XD I just need to figure out if I'm gonna go back to the roots of humor or push harder on the action/drama and remove/redo that part. I'm curious what everyone would rather see.

Honestly, after having a night to think about it, I think it's the fourth-wall breaking that kind of got to me. Most of the rest of it seemed fine - the sort of banter you'd see in an action movie or science fiction book. The comedia ex machina was kind of over the top, and just broke immersion for a while.

One idea would be to move that sort of stuff to an omake segment that runs after the credits, when losing immersion isn't a big deal.

Getting the bad ending didn't really help - for some reason, I wasn't really sure what the game wanted in terms of the girls' choices, and it seemed like I was being asked to make choices before I really knew the characters well.

Again, I actually like this series, and want to see where it goes. And, honestly, the development process seems to be going well - I'm actually believing that you'll pull of an episodic series with high production values. So if I give feedback, please take it in terms of being an opportunity to improve. (And if it's not helpful - please tell me so.)

Supporting creators since 2004(When was the last time you backed up your game?)

PyTom wrote:Getting the bad ending didn't really help - for some reason, I wasn't really sure what the game wanted in terms of the girls' choices, and it seemed like I was being asked to make choices before I really knew the characters well.

Truth be told, I was a tad worried that I may have set it too hard on the endings without enough clear cut choices. I might try setting it a tad easier in future releases.

PyTom wrote:Again, I actually like this series, and want to see where it goes. And, honestly, the development process seems to be going well - I'm actually believing that you'll pull of an episodic series with high production values. So if I give feedback, please take it in terms of being an opportunity to improve. (And if it's not helpful - please tell me so.)

Feedback is always helpful. Things don't get better if nobody ever says anything. ^_^ And I wouldn't say development is going well. XD There is a lot of behind the scenes drama and fighting going on that is putting a major hinder on things. Most of it not even directly involving this project in particular. I'm taking a week off to rest my brain, cope with these issues, and hopefully return a little less ragged than I am now.

dott.Piergiorgio wrote:a technical question: seems to me that there's some mixup in the persistent data (the saves from ep.zero are in the slots of the freshly-installed ep.1)

because I like to compare ep.0 and ep.1, I wonder about how to proceed for avoiding the umpleasantness of mixed-up owerwriting and data mismatch caused by loading the wrong saving...

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

Ah, learning something new every day. Well, if you load from the prior saves, I can almost guarantee that you will get the worse ending due to me not having coded certain variables in EP:0 and changing some things around. Loading prior saves should work properly in EP:2, now that I've got an interesting idea, but for now I am afraid you will have to start a new game and ignore/save over the old saves. Do not worry, EP:0 was merged and slightly redone in EP:1 due to it only being a pilot/beta.

That was... interesting, I have to say. It was like suddenly reading the seventh book in a series without touching any of its predecessors... which is good, as this is essentially the situation I'm in.

The characters were well-sketched out, but a lot of the decisions required intimate knowledge of them the reader just won't have without playing through the game multiple times. The Chief Editor, at least, was hilarious though, as was the "Trauma" line during the Syl dream.

Actual writing was okay. Lots of rambling flashbacks that violate the "show-don't-tell" rule, but they're almost necessary to the game, seeing as how they're our only source of information about this guy and his many adventures. Also, the total jaded cynicism of most of the cast wasn't exactly inspiring, though I can see how it shows that they need a vacation bad.

Finally, I really wish I were smart enough to figure out how to get all the endings. I can only seem to find four.

SpectralTime wrote:That was... interesting, I have to say. It was like suddenly reading the seventh book in a series without touching any of its predecessors... which is good, as this is essentially the situation I'm in.

The characters were well-sketched out, but a lot of the decisions required intimate knowledge of them the reader just won't have without playing through the game multiple times. The Chief Editor, at least, was hilarious though, as was the "Trauma" line during the Syl dream.

Actual writing was okay. Lots of rambling flashbacks that violate the "show-don't-tell" rule, but they're almost necessary to the game, seeing as how they're our only source of information about this guy and his many adventures. Also, the total jaded cynicism of most of the cast wasn't exactly inspiring, though I can see how it shows that they need a vacation bad.

Finally, I really wish I were smart enough to figure out how to get all the endings. I can only seem to find four.

I'm afraid that is why I did have to do the info dump in episode one. There may be a few later on, but they will be much smaller. I tried to make them as interesting as best as I could.

I may end up releasing a walk-through, even though I really didn't wish to. As I mentioned before, there was some mild worry that the "best" endings might be too hard to get to while we were doing the beta.

---Note: I do not expect anyone to jackpot on the first play-through. Even if you had read prior stories, a lot of the options will require you to see how they play out. However, if you wimp out and go with this guide, you should be able to unlock all seven endings and most of the dialog that requires a certain HP level with a girl to unlock. There may be a couple scenes you have to play around to get, but you should get those by bumbling around without this guide. Don't worry, they aren't important. Also, the forum version of the walkthrough does NOT include the reasons why, due to me not wanting to overbloat this post. However, if you are interested, I've posted the link to a text version of it that includes my notes.

5 pts for each girl's ending
6 pts for the extended version
Anything under results in Chief's End. HOWEVER, I will release a small spoiler in saying that getting this end will set you up better in EP:2 for the next romancible character. The other ends will not give you her opening scene and have you start handicapped with that character. Can't have a harem... at least not this early in the series.

Now don't say I never give you anything. I really hate releasing these...

I just finished playing Ep.1 (without reading a walkthrough); so, my first
impressions: in general I liked this game, good plot, some handsome findings.
But there are some remarks as well.

For the first play it was very hard to make decisions:

at the moment I knew all
the characters and understand them a bit, it was (nearly) impossible to change
anything: I targeted at Syl, but got chief director in the end. On second play
I already knew enough of them to make appropriate choises: it was easy to find
all other six endings, maybe a bit too easy; but that's not fair enough,
because I already knew something about each character beforehand. From the
other hand, in real life it is often necessary to make decisions with
insufficient data on your hands.

So my feelings about early-important-choises
are mixed enough.

I liked a blend of humor and serious drama, I personally prefer more drama and
plot which engages player to think something about, but this is my very
personal preference and I don't insist on anything.

Chief director dialogues were a bit annoying, not without some special salt,
but nevertheless they annoyed me and ruined general mood.

English is not my native language and I must admit it was hard for me to read
some slang in dialogues. I do not ask you to make it simpler (ample language is
a good style), but maybe the style should be more literate.

Text font is quite good, but lower "k" is barely readable, can be easily
confused with "h'" or something like that.

Also I found a typo:

in the ending with Yoi, in the inner Anton's thought:
"I've got to difibilarte her heart": perhaps, "defibrillate" instead of
"difibilarte"?.